The Role of Technology for Student Success in Clinical Placements

Clinical placements are essential for aspiring healthcare professionals. They provide future medical teams with hands-on experience in real-world patient care settings, allowing students to develop critical skills, explore various specialties, and gain confidence in their abilities while also building valuable professional networks. Clinical rotations offer insights into healthcare systems and prepare students to navigate the complexities of clinical environments. 

While clinical placements play a vital role in equipping healthcare students with essential skills and experiences, the stark reality of a shrinking labor pool adds urgency to the need for effective training and support in the industry. In 2022, the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) reported that enrollment in entry-level baccalaureate nursing programs dropped by 1.4%, marking the end of two decades of growth in training for new registered nurses. This drop, partly attributed to uncertainty surrounding student clinical placements in the third year, highlights the urgent need for educational institutions to establish clear career pathways for their students.

 A 2022 McKinsey & Company report estimated that by this year, 2025, the United States will have a gap of between 200,000 and 450,000 nurses available for direct patient care. To meet this demand, the United States would need to more than double the number of new graduates entering and staying in the nursing workforce every year for the next three years straight. The UK, Canada, and Australia are also seeing significant labor gaps in medical professions, including general practitioners, nurses, and specialists. 

Addressing workforce shortages and the need for better workforce management strategies is critical as the healthcare system faces increasing demand.

Hurdles in Clinical Placement Experiences on Both Sides 

The bridge between theoretical knowledge and practical application, clinical rotations are an integral aspect of healthcare education that immerse students in real-world environments, allowing them to apply classroom concepts to genuine patient care scenarios. Along with knowledge application, skill development, and teamwork training, proper preparation reduces student stress and anxiety, boosts patient care through increased confidence, and facilitates long-term professional growth.

Several factors can negatively impact the clinical placement experience for students.

• Poor Communication: Lack of clear expectations about the roles, responsibilities, and learning objectives can lead to confusion and frustration. Insufficient communication about schedules and changes in rotations disrupt students’ learning experiences.
• Inadequate Orientation: Students may struggle if they receive no orientation to the clinical site or the specific unit where they are placed, resulting in feelings of being unprepared.
• Insufficient Supervision: If preceptors or staff nurses are too busy to provide adequate guidance and mentorship, students may feel lost or unsupported.
• No Feedback Mechanisms: Without systems for constructive feedback during clinical rotations, students have no sense of their strengths and areas for improvement, which can hinder students’ learning and development.
• Limited Learning Opportunities: If the clinical setting does not align with the student’s educational goals or provides limited exposure to critical nursing skills, it can lead to dissatisfaction.

Meanwhile, as students grapple with their own set of challenges during clinical placements, the teams responsible for coordinating these experiences and the hospital staff overseeing them also face significant obstacles that can impact the overall success of the clinical rotation process.

1. Operational Complexity: Acquiring data and reports from units, departments, and colleges that use different documents and/or don’t communicate with each other makes the role cumbersome and time-consuming for both placement officers and hospital teams.
2. Lack of Coherence: When internal systems are not coordinated, staff often realize at the last minute that students are missing certifications or credentials required by the hiring entities. This makes it difficult for chief nursing officers, directors of nursing, and hospital graduate recruitment coordinators to integrate them into the clinical setting.
3. Inaccurate Student Information: Current student placement models often require placement staff to rely on students manually sharing information, which leads to incorrect or missing data and an inability to efficiently track student requirements, leading to potential errors and/or lack of compliance.
4. Allocation Issues: Large healthcare entities often lack full visibility over all their students and processes across their entire networks, making it difficult to analyze where they have capacity. Conflicts may also arise from improperly matching students with clinical sites or preceptors based on skills, interests, or learning goals, leading to poor experiences. 
5. Threats to Accreditation: Inaccurate data due to manual and disparate collection systems constantly threatens universities’ accreditation status. On the other hand, chasing down credentials from schools and licensing boards is extremely laborious and pressure-filled.  
6. Shortage of Reliable Data: When organizations are limited in their ability to report on data, it’s difficult to accurately report placement statistics and success rates that drive student enrollment, board approvals, partner decisions, and the like. 
7. Inability to Track Long-Term: Fragmented systems make it difficult to identify students as future employees and nurture a pipeline of potential talent.

Leveraging Technology to Build Strong Partnerships & Enhance Student Readiness

Rapid changes in education and healthcare, combined with a shrinking labor force, highlight the urgent need for strong partnerships between universities and clinical sites to enhance student placements. Leveraging student placement software has become integral in fostering success by streamlining the placement process, enabling seamless communication, efficiently tracking student progress, and enhancing collaboration. By harnessing technology, both sectors can work together to create tailored experiences that enhance student readiness and improve the overall candidate experience. Technology is not just a facilitator; it’s a game changer in building robust connections that ultimately empower students to thrive in their future careers.

1. Saves Time: An integrated online platform for managing clinical placements eliminates the myriad of dissimilar spreadsheets, forms, databases, and emails that many colleges, universities, and clinical sites employ. These disparate documents are time-consuming and uncoordinated, and they fail to capture data consistently and accurately, ultimately resulting in a poor student experience.
2. Improves Communication: Technology enables seamless communication between students, educational institutions, and healthcare providers, fostering transparency and collaboration.
3. Enables Feedback Loops: Built-in tracking allows for efficient oversight of student competency tracking, ensuring that faculty can intervene and provide guidance when needed, maximizing the student’s academic journey.
4. Reduces Costs: In higher education, where limited budgets require institutions to stretch their resources, placement software streamlines administrative processes and automates routine tasks, allowing institutions to allocate their resources more effectively. Efficient student placement processes on the hospital side reduces costs due to overtime, agency staffing, or other unplanned expenses. 
5. Ensures Compliance: A centralized platform simplifies and streamlines the accreditation process for nursing deans, enabling them to efficiently track student requirements and minimize the risk of errors and compliance issues. This software also easily stores and reports on documentation that hospital teams need for internal audits, Joint Commission surveys, and Department of Health checks.
6. Propels Data-Driven Decisions: Automated and consistent data collection enables all organizations to assess the effectiveness of their programs, partners, and student outcomes. Data-driven insights help institutions allocate resources effectively, streamline scheduling, identify future problems or bottlenecks, and make evidence-based decisions.
7. Empowers Continuous Improvement: Student placement software can generate detailed outcome reports that track students’ progress and achievements and provide valuable feedback to refine curricula and training methods.
8. Enables Proactive Planning: With technology, placement officers have visibility across their entire network so they can forecast placement capacity, identify available preceptors, and view real-time data on current placements. 
9. Strengthens Relationships: Managing thousands of placements and projects per year prevents placement staff from focusing on building relationships with new hiring entities, which undermines the student experience. Automation allows hospitals to expand their placement capacities and enhance transparency, which fosters stronger connections with higher education institutions. As a result, students and the healthcare system benefit from a well-prepared workforce that can tackle future challenges.
10. Enhance Student Engagement: When students have access to personalized dashboards, they are more likely to meet onboarding deadlines and complete requirements, feel confident in knowing and understanding their schedule and placement details, and report feeling less anxious about their placements overall.

Building a Workforce Pipeline

Preparing health professional students for success in clinical placements is a collective responsibility that requires effective partnerships between educational institutions and healthcare organizations. By leveraging technology solutions like placement software, these organizations can focus on the critical skills students need for clinical success, ensuring a competent and prepared workforce for the future of healthcare.

Investing in robust clinical placement systems contributes to individual student success. It also enhances the overall quality of patient care, strengthening the health system to build a resilient future for healthcare that meets the evolving demands of our communities.